Loralee's Fancy: A green-thumb I am not.

We have been working on our garden. Or making the attempt.

About four ...maybe six weeks ago Ryan and I planted some herb seeds: basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme, and marjoram—some of the herbs I cook with the most. They have sprouted and are growing happily on my plant shelves. Yay!

They all sprouted within about ten days. :-)

I also have some cherry tomatoes that I started from seed a couple of months back. And two weeks ago we went to Split Mountain Nursery and bought a whole bunch of tomato plants, pepper plants, a zucchini plant (just one) and some cucumber plants. Yum!

But it was probably not a good idea to buy the plants when we did because the garden still isn't ready for them.

You may not remember that when we first bought our house it had a brick patio on the west side of the shed. I remember it well, because we have removed and rearranged those bricks... a couple of times since we've lived here.

This photo is from 2018, the very first time
we took the bricks out.

That's Bruce, planting our very first garden here in 2018. We laid the bricks down around the garden (everywhere you see bare dirt in the picture, plus a path down the center). I don't remember why we moved the bricks again, but we had to for some reason. And now we are doing it again. But I do know why this time.

The kids and I spent one grueling hour in the heat
of the day moving about half of those bricks. (Which pile did I stack, and which one did the kids stack?)
Then Bruce helped me move the rest of them
early last Saturday morning.

This year I want to build grow-boxes instead of just having regular garden beds. This is because our garden washes into and over the bricks every year. That's one reason that we moved those bricks again.

The garden fabric we had underneath the bricks was no longer preventing weeds and grass from growing up through the brick. (We just reused the old fabric that was under the brick patio to begin with.) That's another, even better, reason for moving them again.

And because we tore out a whole bunch of bushes that first year, and then didn't really level the ground very well, all of the brick paths were pretty uneven. And with the plants and the dirt trying to take over the brick, sometimes those uneven spots were not very visible. It was kind of a tripping hazard. So that's the third reason for moving them. Again.

Right now our garden looks like this:

It looks like a pretty shady deal, but this photo
was just taken first thing this morning. It actually
gets more sun, for most of the day, than
any other spot in our tree-lined yard.

Well, after we moved all the brick, Bruce and I came into the house and planned out where we want the boxes to be, and figured out what we'd need for supplies. The main garden will be U-shaped. We'll have a smaller box right next to the shed, and put some kind of trellis stuff on the shed walls so we can grow viney veggies (like cucumbers, pole beans, etc.) on the shed—or maybe we'll just put carrots and radishes in there. We'll put brick along the back wall, bordering the garden, but we're thinking of leaving a few open spaces to see if we can grow grapes along the wall. We'll see. And then, of course, we'll put bricks all around and in-between the other sides of the boxes.

Well, when we had that all figured out, we went and spent a fortune at Lowe's getting the wood for the boxes. We are hoping to can hundreds of tomatoes this year—and for the next ten years—to get back our investment. ;-)

Seriously!
What's the deal with the crazy price of lumber?

We had an adventure at Lowe's, too. The nice, young man (Jason North) who was helping us load fourteen-foot boards into our twelve-foot van accidentally bumped a board into our windshield.

looking out through a cracked windshield
Uh-oh!

But, since Jason was on the clock, Lowe's will pay to replace the windshield. Now I won't have to clean all the bugs off of it. ;-)

And here we are: The bricks are moved and the garden is tilled, but we still need to finish leveling the paths for the bricks. We also need to find where we can tap into the sprinkling system to get water to the shed-wall garden, and the dreamed-of grapes. Then we can build everything.

In the meantime, our "garden" is in the kitchen, sitting on (and around) the plant shelf I built last summer.

Our new plants overflowed the shelf, and
all the big pots I'd bought had to be
displaced. But it's temporary...just until
the garden is ready for them.

There's just one more planty adventure to relate:

A week or so after Memorial Day, Bruce and I were at the grocery store and I saw a basket full of very dry rosemary plants on clearance. They had tags on them that said they were great for grilling, so they were obviously meant to be consumed and were not well cared for. We bought one and brought it home, thinking to transplant and water the poor thing. If it didn't survive, I figured we could at least take the dry leaves and put them into a spice jar to cook with, and that didn't sound so bad.

And then I went through a period of complete and utter non-motivation; it was all I could do some days just to complete one task—which was usually making dinner. So the rosemary sat in front of the plant shelf, and it got watered every now and then.

This morning I looked at that poor, sad rosemary plant and decided I'd better do something about it, since now at least two-thirds of the leaves were completely dry. So I prepared a bigger pot for it, and then tried to remove it from its current pot. It wouldn't budge. And the dry leaves were falling everywhere and getting mixed with dirt.

So I took it outside where I could be really serious about it, and not as worried about getting dirt everywhere. There I discovered that it had lots of roots growing out of the holes in the bottom of the pot, and the only way to loosen it from the pot was to scrape or cut them off. So I did.

And it still was not going to leave that darn little seven-inch pot.

I grabbed a knife and cut the pot off of the plant. It was so rootbound that I couldn't begin to loosen its roots, and I wondered if they'd be able to spread out in the new pot. So then I started to perform surgery on it. (I'm sure it thought I was committing herbicide!) I stuck a fork right into the middle of that tangle of root-ball, and started twisting, hearing the roots snap with every turn. And then I had the bright idea to put the sprayer on the hose and shoot water at the roots. That did loosen and remove some dirt, but I really think there were more tangled roots than there was dirt. At least the roots became a little more pliable.

Finally I decided to stop torturing the poor plant and bring it into the house, pot it, water it, and place it on the plant shelf. And here it is: